Among the three member states of the East African Community, Tanzania is the most costly for investors from both home and abroad, according to a World Bank report.

The report, Doing Business in 2006: Creating Jobs, showed that the least start-up cost for a business in Tanzania was 161.3 percent of per-capita income, as compared with 48.2 percent in Kenya and 117.8 percent in Uganda.

Investors needed to go through 26 procedures to obtain their licenses in Tanzania, as against 11 procedures in Kenya and 19 in Uganda, local media Thursday quoted the report as saying.

It took investors an average of 313 days to go through all required procedures in Tanzania whereas it took 170 days in Kenya and 155 days in Uganda.

The World Bank report, therefore, ranked Tanzania as Number 140th among 155 countries in the world that had been surveyed for easiness of doing business in.

Kenya was ranked 68th and Uganda, 72nd.

The World Bank report is the third in a series of annual surveys investigating regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it.

The report took into account such factors as entry regulation, registration and licensing, hiring and firing of employees, property protection, credit availability, tax regime, cross-border trading, contract enforcement and closing of business.

Source: Xinhua